The shift away from open standards did not hurt these companies in the slightest, and only benefited them. StackOverflow, whose community is most developers, had less than a 2% OpenID usage. Mozilla Persona wasn't ahead of it's time, it was a regression to the mean; a project Mozilla gave up on just like they gave up on ... not being a total piece of shit company that forced resignations of a Christian because of his private religious beliefs.

Do you really think any new federation signon system will catch on, outside of truly open source distributed projects? In the 90s they might have, but today, we have way too many commies who have personal missions to push Code-of-conducts and documentation changes in projects they've never written a single line of code for. The frothing morons on Hackernews will praise such people (the ones who don't are banned) and we watch everything turn to shit under a blanket of ideological luxury beliefs.

I don't want to be negative. I want to believe. But my negative comes from what I've seen with my own eyes. It's a moral panic that is not going away. It will only grow like a cancer.